


unlinear g

by macha



Series: Georgia on My Mind [9]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-08
Updated: 2007-05-08
Packaged: 2017-10-18 11:46:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macha/pseuds/macha





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and the name of the tale is:

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She was never ever gonna be language girl, nossir. And incantations used to drive her boggly. But she'd never met a dragon, and she itched to explore the science of it, and okay maybe a teensy bit to hitch a ride. There was one smothered giggle from Buffy when she suggested it, so she should have guessed there was some part of that request that wasn't quite right.

But nobody warned her. They just nodded gravely, and after a while one morning the dragon came to call. What was she expecting, a petting zoo or a circus ride?; she could no longer remember. All she'd had to work with in the anecdotal was a very large dragon, even by dragon standards. Who didn't entirely seem to be always the same size, or color, or shape, from one moment to another. Who occasionally faded in and out, like a radio signal. Who flew without gravity, heat, or air in the cold of space, for entertainment. Who had called them back after the end of the world, and built the ship, and vacated the galaxy, all in the blink, according to Buffy, who damnstraight wasn't a very reliable witness. And Buffy claimed it wasn't even magic, contradicting every text that Willow had ever read. It was impossible. It was intriguing. She was determined to get to the bottom of it, and that was that.

She dressed in her very best, at least when it came to the middle ages. It might be inappropriate, but it was the only costume model she had. And where had all those legendary dragons disappeared to anyway? Too many St Georges, maybe? But this time thousands of slayers had been unable to hold back the tide. Tara gave her outfit the Kiss of Serious Approval. Illyria only snorted - god-kings had no respect (the shells were flimsy, all of them) - and the small girl still hiding in Willow's core sort of agreed it looked a bit too much like the maiden chained up waiting for the dragon to get the munchies. Cue the resolve face, bring out the grr in grrl; it was time to party. Dawn came to inspect, and told her the formal approach was perfect for the first state visit. But the minx refused to come and translate; "you'll see", was all she said.

So she came down the stairs deliciously trepidacious in maroon velvet, with linen and lace that had even been ironed (but since it was doubtful the dragon had ever done much ironing, how come the iron worked fine?). Skirted (but never skirting), she fell into the role and went medieval. Let's see, community housed and fed for the day, keys to the castle on her hip, no chastity belt, accounts all up to date, check. Lady of the manor, then. Or maybe of the lake. Who the hell was she, anyway? Should have gone Joan in soft leather pants and carried a sword.

Buffy was wearing sunglasses, sandals, a ponytail, and a sundress she'd had for at least a million years that managed to clash with Willow's ensemble. She came with her as far as the door, and waved like a kid, and went back inside. To her weapons class in one of the inner courtyards; where Willow should have been, except for the date with the dragon.

She stepped out into the sunlight uncertainly, resplendent but all alone. Now she was sure she'd got the whole thing wrong. She wanted to go back upstairs to change, burst into tears, have a tantrum, something. She'd met with kings, and gods, and fairy tales. What on earth was reducing her to a puddle now? Here there be dragons.

Up, look up. Way up. And I'll call Rusty. Good name or maybe epithet for a dragon, or a redhaired girl. How do you meet a dragon's eye when the eye itself is as tall as you? She made herself as tall as she could, and looked up at a dragon looking down with lively interest. And pictures flooded into her brain:

red girl / not-hunter / eye of Chosen 

Follow the pattern of it, Dawnie told her. Losing her nerve, no freaking way today, Jose, how long had it been? Time for Analysis Girl to save the day. A formal greeting, tripartite, descriptive. No verbs at all. Oo-kay. _This is how she sees me._ Undeniably red. Not-hunter, is that a slight or just an observation, coming from a warrior race? Eye of Chosen, in the i of eye, is it a job title or a compliment?   
Thank the gods she'd left behind she'd had the sense to ply Spike with beer, not that he was hard to ply except that she had to figure out how to make it first, and got him to spill about his 'elder-dragon mate, friend of Buffy's'. Not like her best friend was ever gonna brief her. Was mother of dragons the usual drill or a prided accomplishment? There wasn't a word about dragon-rearing in any tome at all to give her a clue.

mother of dragons / dreamer / eye of coldfire 

She gambled on the dreamer part, because Spike imp-plied that Georgia claimed to be a poet, even though in these here parts them could be fighting words. Eye of coldfire seemed safe enough, poetic even. Maybe she really could do this. Not that there were any exit signs. For a minute she felt naked again, just like she always was in every classroom nightmare. Willow the Imposter, Empress of No Clothes.

worldmaker / threeweaver / heartswish 

There was almost a bow in it. And that curl of lip could be a smile. Respect, she was offering respect. Worldmaker had to be about the world she was building in the ship, a whole ecology for them to live in. Oh, and also the proposal she'd presented, what they could do to help as well as fight. To preserve the human race. Honoring the Willow that thought of herself every day as faking it, pretending she had it covered so no one would panic, so far from home and nothing left to go back to. She had to do it, project a Willow growing Worlds without end in petri dishes full of their rarest of resources. What we are is what we make. And Georgia, who built the ship and brought them safely here, considered Willow what, capable of doing much the same?

Threeweaver, was that her Three, with Tara and that bit of Fred inside the godking? Or Buffy's? She'd bring Angel back to them both if only she could find a way. Any witch way, it could only be a reference to the personal. Something you only say to a friend. Threeweaver then, coming from the one who gave her the gift of Tara, and Illyria too, in the recent summoning.

Heartswish, she already had her heartswish. Whatever came. What was there left to ask for, after that? Well, let's find out. She sent ideas:

trueflight / eyrie / nesting 

And in the golden eye that she could read, she read surprise. But she wanted to know, the mysteries of human life, the secret lore of dragons. Where to give her heart, where to find the core of the Other, of one another. Because the day was coming when they'd have to know, so much more than they knew, to take the next step all of them would need to take. To find the heart of the dragon, as Spike did once. She needed to learn for herself about the ones she had to make alliance with, and the ones she had to fight.

And okay, also: stuck in the lab too often, looking for all too solid ground to build their everything on, she wanted to know what it was like to really fly, to be free for just a little while of debts and obligations.

Three days they flew across the world into the sunsets. She thought of every girl riding dragon story she had ever read. The landscape looked untouched, full of forests and rolling hills, long waterfalls and rivers flowing, lakes shimmering in the sunlight. This is our Middle Earth, she thought, and we have come into the West at last. The colors were not the same as home, but neither were the three moons in the sky. An empty planet, full of resources they could use in time. But would not ever darken, she wanted to promise World. Worldmakers have to be responsible. Invisible to enemies, Georgia had promised. If only everyone could stay. But worlds were dying all around them.

What was she meant to see, on the other side of the planet nobody had the time to explore? They didn't seem to be in any hurry, setting down often for pitstops and food and sleep. There were blankets, one sleeping bag, clean clothes, and picnic baskets. Where did she stow them all? She couldn't catch her packing. They'd all known all about it, hadn't they, and never said a word. She was clearly going to have to somehow get even, if she survived the trip.

Not everyone gets to say they've camped out with an elder dragon. Who mostly went small, and slept like a cat, with her nose burrowed under where her tail curled up. One night, though, she went bigger and curled up all around the encampment; and Willow imagined predators, but slept soundly inside, kind of, the belly of the dragon.

The whole experience had ceased to feel unreal, and oddly segued into something both casual and intimate. Is this what it's like to have a dragon as a friend?, she thought. Spike certainly liked to lounge about in bars with this one. But really, how many dragons actually went camping? Inquiring minds demand to know. She tried to imagine Georgia putting up a dragon-sized pup tent, and started to giggle. How many dragons counted humans as potentially part of their flists? In her experience, they'd mostly counted them as potentially part of their menu. What was different about Georgia that made this, all of this, the whole damned thing where the world ended and they somehow didn't, possible?

Georgia didn't appear to eat, which made her wonder. She sent an image of empty dishes, with starving dragon. She got back three pictures in return, and burst out laughing: Spike's blooming onion thing, and curly fries, with six pitchers of beer. Spike was a terrible influence, but that wasn't exactly much of a surprise. More life in him to spare than most of the living boasted, that first while. Shock is a funny thing. Spike, though, just refused to quit, and long odds never bothered him. She offered up an eggplant sandwich, but the dragon wouldn't bite. Maybe this explained the shortage of predators, though? But she was not-hunter.

She thought about fiery breath as a feature instead of a bug and made a mental note: self, learn the formula for marshmallows and add it to the replicator. And oh, also graham wafers. For next time. The formula for chocolate, naturally, had been entered long since. As it turned out, what was necessary for survival could only be represented by a surprisingly complicated equation. And come to think of it, someone should get a pub going, seeing that the House was impossibly larger than it used to be. A wonder Spike had not suggested it; he must be really stretched, with all those master classes. Self-defence, no longer an optional extra.

And they had campfire conversations every night, like a very oddly-matched pair of girl scouts. The first one was the hardest. Georgia sent her

redgirl / whitegirl / blackgirl 

and all three were clearly Willow, at the saving of one world and at the almost-end of another. How could she ever explain it, when she could never rub any one of them out? And then she thought, threeWeaver, this is who i am today. and she sent back redgirl with Buffy and whitegirl with Tara and blackgirl alone. And Georgia sent back

reddragon / whitedragon/ blackdragon 

which Willow totally understood. It is the same for me, the dragon (!) told her, I also am the same. Threeweavers, and worldmakers too. A scary prospect, to be so... necessary; she was more used to thinking of herself as a mere administrator these days, not as a Great Red Hope. But here they were only two changers, and there was so very much at stake. Could they really rebuild the stars with what they had to work with now, in a state of war? In a universe in which the greater enemies were entropy and time? Now there was time to play with, but didn't there always come an end to everything?

Thereafter, they were at ease with one another. She took a notion and recited to the dragon every scrap of verse she could remember: rock lyrics, and children's songs, and fragments of poems she'd liked from school, and even the odd bit she wrote herself. She didn't try to translate it, but she hoped it came across like music. And she got what she thought might be some poetry back, in a dragon language even Dawn hadn't made much headway with as yet, most of it sounding fearfully martial, some of it pretty quiet for a dragon, like tears falling into still water maybe, with precise spare sounds that lingered, reverberating, and somehow added up to more than they promised. The quiet ones she liked to think were Georgia's.

Then she had the idea of sending images of all the artwork she had ever tried to draw, mostly from books of her father's. It was hard to recall enough detail to represent the artist's work, but she sent everything she could remember from her sketchbooks, from Altdorfer to Chagall to Rothko. Just because it seemed unlikely that Spike had introduced Georgia to a whole lot of art museums, and now every bit of it was gone except for what was documented in their library. Georgia had favorites, too, because there were some she lingered over: Van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage with the little dog and the mirror between them and Matisse's Dream with its scrumptious color and wiggly lines. Was it the paintings themselves she managed to communicate, or her own passion for them, and her sorrow that they were irretrievably gone. What came back in return wasn't exactly painting, but it was not what she expected, fractal images in kaleidoscopic riot, little bits of things combining and falling apart. Compound, complex. It made her think about how, and what, a dragon really saw through those golden eyes.

On the fourth day they touched down early, and went trekking down about a mile through untouched meadow. It was a perfect day, with a cloudless sky, and there were what looked like butterflies if you didn't look too close. Of course, she thought, the day we decide to go for a hike would have to be the day when I wore the velvet gown again. But then they came to a castle, and Willow let herself have a moment of smug about having finally got it right about the proper thing to wear. They walked across a lowered drawbridge over a moat, and she wondered if human castles were just cheap imitations of dragon architecture, memories that stayed in the genes across millennia.

This time, Georgia did not present herself as small, which had something to say about the size of the hall they entered. Inside, it was not cold stone as she expected: woven tapestries covered every wall, and also the floor. It might even have been cozy if it hadn't been built to hold a hundred Georgias. It was hard to be sure whether the tapestries were figurative or pure design, because the images didn't resolve when she looked at them straight; she did better looking out of the corner of her eye. Which was just as well, since their entry appeared to have caused a sensation. Clearly no picnic baskets had been prepared at this end of the journey: other dragons rushed in, in a variety of sizes, alarmed by... her, of all things. And here she'd been thinking of herself as gnat-like. Either they had a fine eye for gnats, or she had more presence than she gave herself credit for. She could only hope there wasn't a flyswatter handy.

Oddly, she wasn't terrified. She'd never fought dragons on the battlefield, but only in warrooms, in simulations, and in small calm rooms where she could concentrate. She'd never known a dragon except for Georgia. No way was she worried about Georgia. And Georgia was bigger than all these other dragons milling about. Besides, there were so many observations to be made, because clearly dragons actually lived here, and getting invited home for tea - though hopefully not for lunch - just didn't happen. Not even to friends of Georgia.

Until, apparently, now. The scene resolved into some semblage of non-pandemonium. Well, at least, if you were a dragon; to a human, all that armor and scales and claws, meeting the stone, and the screeching that may have been dialogue, the universal language of thinly disguised panic, or whatever passed for testosterone, didn't count as optimal for meditation. But soon enough Georgia turned to her with two lined up, who kind of bowed, so she did too, cause hey, if they decided to take a swipe with those claws, at least she'd miss the visual. And Georgia sent

matefirst / homefire / matesecond 

... which definitely clarified the situation. Why Georgia, you sly old dragon, you!, a thought that possibly showed on her face, cause she could have sworn she got a wink in return. And then: she's got another version of threeweaver.

And then there were dragonlets, also introduced. Depending on their size, they tended to squirm on formal occasions, and galumphed out as soon as their part in the ceremony was done. Both mates disappeared with, or at least retreated quickly running after, the littlest set, who had departed with an impressive burst of speed round the nearest corner. And Georgia shrugged - what can you do? - and she knew the feeling, since in the House it was much the same.

Up in an eyrie, Georgia showed her eggs, warm eggs, which was just like the fairy tales predicted. At least until one hatched, then three, of the cutest little babies, and Georgia handed one to her, its eyes not open yet, and she held it in her arms until the mates rushed in to take charge and shoo both her and Georgia out as completely clueless in whatever needed to be done. Georgia was surely grinning ear to ear, she couldn't possibly have been reading that in.

Then they had a feast of what seemed to be watercress sandwiches, complete with clotted cream, and some kind of grain flatbread, served with terrific dragon tea, and after that a whole lot of dark ale of which Georgia appeared to be darn proud. She was pretty sure she was drinking out of a baby cup.

And she sent to Georgia beautiful baby pictures, dragon and human both, and then a sadness. And she got images in triplicate of dragons mating and tearing one another apart in the sky, eggs that opened to monsters that were not dragons, eggs that were hollow. Over time, a very long time.

No wonder this place was hidden.

Dreamers. Both of them were dreamers. She was standing inside the dragon's boundaries, inside her deepest secret, her dearest dream. Heartswish. They dreamed together that it didn't have to happen. That they could stop it. That they could change it. Peace in the universe, that could never be because there were no children to stop fighting for. Except here.

changer / heartshome / starseed 

Now she knew the changer, and had held the child. Only one changer, out of another hostile, self-destructive race that had outlived its ability to sustain itself. Only Georgia dreamed that love was more important than winning. And in response had offered them a universe in hope they could find common ground. A gift of a second chance to build something new, so worlds would never die before their time. Starseed was what they both needed to do, if the universe was to survive. Seed the worlds with living matter, settlements and slayers, knowledge and hope. Learning to help where they could, defend where they must.

redgirl / warmfire / binding 

What they both wanted was the same. Changers. Worldmakers. To save every world they could, against the dark. To give back to the universe what they themselves had almost/nearly lost.

hearthmaker / heartgift / freeflight 

A hearth. A gift. A taste of flight. A home.


End file.
